The US State Department described the cartoons as "offensive to the beliefs of Muslims" and warned that press freedom "must be coupled with press responsibility."
Anti-European protests erupted in cities in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Europe, but there was also a sense of relief after millions of Muslims attended Friday prayers without a major outpouring of street violence.
Demonstrations were reported from Turkey, where protestors burnt French and Danish flags, to Indonesia, where around 100 men stormed the building of the Danish embassy, chanting "Let's go jihad (holy war), we're ready for jihad".
But the main focus of unrest was in the Palestinian territories, especially the West Bank city of Nablus where some 20,000 protestors burnt the flags of Denmark, France and Norway, where the offending sketches appeared in full.
In a chilling warning in Gaza City, the preacher at the main mosque said "those who have published these caricatures must have their heads cut. We will not accept anything less."
Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas, in a telephone call to Danish Prime Minister Per Stig Moeller, characterised the cartoons as "offensive and unacceptable."
Muslim clerics across the Gulf repeated their calls for boycotts of goods from European countries where they appeared.
In Africa, large rallies took place in Sudan and Zanzibar, while some 2,000 Moroccans demonstrated outside the parliament in Rabat, shouting anti-Semitic slogans and calling for a boycott of European goods.
Some demonstrations were also held in Europe, the noisiest in London, where around 300 protestors picketed the Danish embassy, some chanting their allegiance to Osama bin Laden.
Debate over press freedom
The row over the cartoons has sparked widely diverging reactions within Europe and in the United States.
While some countries in Europe have defended the freedom of the press to publish the images Britain and the United States became the latest governments to blast the decision.
"There is freedom of speech, we all respect that," British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said. "But there is not any obligation to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory," he said.
But Denmark, the country at the heart of the storm, reiterated Friday that it was "deeply distressed that many Muslims have seen the drawings... as a defamation of the Prophet Mohammed."
"Freedom of expression and freedom of the press are the very cornerstones of any democratic society," said Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
That view was echoed by the pan European security body, the Organization for Security and Co operation in Europe (OSCE), which defended "the right to ridicule ideologies as part of freedom of expression."
But across the Atlantic in Washington a US State Department spokesman blasted the publication by European newspapers as an "unacceptable" incitement to religious or ethnic hatred.
"These cartoons are indeed offensive to the beliefs of Muslims," said spokesman Justin Higgins. "We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression, but it must be coupled with press responsibility."